I cant say enough about Missouri Winter Fire School 2018 this weekend. Great participation for classes, vendors, and activities. Great work MUFRTI! Tracy Gray and staff, fantastic job. Thanks for having me.

To those who participated in my three class session, THANK YOU! Great participation and feedback. I learned as much as hopefully you did. Great diversity and numerous fireground circumstances to evaluate.

Great seeing so many good friends from both my ISFSI and Fire Engineering B&V families as well as colleagues from around the state.

This is a great conference! Feb 2-4 in Columbia! Come check out the expanded version of Tactics from the Right Seat. This interactive seminar is based off of experiences from both the Suburban Fire Tactics text and Suburban Fire Tactics from the Right Seat video.

FDIC 2017 is around the corner! Suburban Fire Tactics will be back for our 7th consecutive year. Do you want to talk fire STUFF? Do you want to talk tactics and strategy? Do you want to talk about fire ground implementation consistent with your circumstances? Then come to Suburban Fire Tactics from the Right Seat on Wednesday (4/26/17) at 10:30, right after opening session.

Suburban Fire Tactics from the Right Seat will be applying all the concepts from the SFT text book (Fire Engineering Books and Videos 2013) for scenario based challenges, which were devised in Suburban Fire Tactics from the Right Seat video (FEB&V 2016).

Mission success! A huge thank you to the Elmsford FD in Westchester, NY for having me speak at their annual Andy Fredericks Memorial Seminar. Humbled and honored to be able to present to such a large audience of enthusiastic firefighters (398 plus 30 vendors) for such a great cause.

I was reminded yesterday on a fire how important experienced company officers and interior benchmarking are in reference to initial fire attack. SOGs are essential, but they are only as good as the people who implement them. It can mean the difference between operational success and failure, failure being loss of life or property (in our world).

Can one learn from a book what hot feels like or when their initial attack line is pinned down? There is only one way to know that the interior conditions of a structure fire are not changing and overwhelming. EXPERIENCE of the fireground. The company officer in question is an aggresive, hard nosed firefighter. Instead of futily trying to push into a situation which his handline was not affecting, he quickly diverted “fire power”,” made a second push and contained the fire to two rooms (fully flashed). BRAVO!

It is not my intent to judge capabilities or put down the neophite. It is my intent to illustrate the importance of expertise in this profession and to encourage the pursuit of “fireground” education.

Short and sweet, but to the point. It is funny how this job inspires a random post……..